Jason Blevins
Outdoors/Business Reporter
Sneak Peek of the Week
US Supreme Court support for Uinta Basin railroad limits court interference in federal agency NEPA reviews
A train transports freight on a common carrier line near Price, Utah, July 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)“Under NEPA, an agency’s only obligation is to prepare an adequate report.”
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh
3,600 pages
Length of the environmental impact statement by the Surface Transportation Board analyzing the Uinta Basin Railway
There were three consequential questions facing U.S. Supreme Court justices in December as they considered the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed railroad that connects the rural oilfields of Utah’s Uinta Basin with the national rail network.
First, should an 88-mile railroad project require several years of federal agency review and 3,600 pages of analysis?
Second, should federal agencies consider unknown but likely impacts of a project, like the climate impacts and community risks of increased drilling, shipping and refining of 5 billion extra gallons of crude every year?
And third, how can the country balance the role of federal agencies reviewing projects under the National Environmental Policy Act — or NEPA — with lawsuits that give courts and judges opportunities to overturn agency reviews?
The case before the high court revolved around the scope of NEPA more than the actual railroad. But the 8-0 decision released Thursday morning cleared the tracks for more crude rolling through Colorado along the Colorado River.
The high court overturned a federal appeals court decision that rejected the Surface Transportation’s Board’s approval of the proposed railroad connecting Utah’s rural Uinta Basin oilfields with the national rail network.
The court said Thursday the Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the controversial Uinta Basin Railway — following several years of review and a 3,600-page environmental impact statement under NEPA — adequately analyzed the impact of the railroad and the agency did not need to study potential impacts from increased drilling or refining of Uinta Basin crude.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in 2023 rejected the board’s approval of the 88-mile railroad, arguing the transportation board should have more closely reviewed impacts beyond the railroad that seven rural Utah counties hoped would spark economic growth with increased production.
The appeals court “did not afford the board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases,” reads the 36-page Supreme Court decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “The D.C. Circuit ordered the board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue.”
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In Their Words
Crested Butte joins growing number of mountain communities funding Forest Service workers
The Crested Butte Conservation Corps — seen here last summer — builds and maintains trails around the town. With eight members working for its ninth summer, the locally funded corps this week picked up 400 pounds of trash around area campsites. Last year the corps collected 2,733 pounds of trash. (Courtesy Crested Butte Conservation Corps)“What makes the American West so unique and so different are our public lands. They need more support and funding these days, not less.”
— Dave Ochs with the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association
11,799
Pounds of trash collected by the Crested Butte Conservation Corps between 2017 and 2024 on public lands in Gunnison County
As the Forest Service contracts with slashed staff and funding, local communities are stepping up with funding for backcountry trail crews, visitor education campaigns and management of campsites and trailheads.
“These folks need help. We know how important it is to have a physical human presence out there,” said Dave Ochs, the head of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association, which is administering $62,500 in local funding to support three seasonal Forest Service employees around Crested Butte. “Let’s help our partners. They are in need and we care very much for our backyard.”
The Gunnison National Forest is not hiring any seasonal workers this summer, leaving a long list of tasks typically done by 12 temporary workers who open trails, handle deferred maintenance, manage trailheads and pit toilets, and work with outfitters and guides. Across Colorado, federal land managers are seeing a growing number of staffers who have taken buyouts or been laid off. They also are not hiring seasonal workers who help manage the crush of summer visitors.
“What makes the American West so unique and so different are our public lands. The people’s lands,” Ochs said. “They need more support and funding these days, not less.”
This is a scene unfolding across Colorado’s public lands as communities labor to fill gaps left by the sudden shrinking of the federal government under the Trump administration.
The National Park Service has closed four of its 10 campgrounds at the 42,000-acre Curecanti National Recreation Area around Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Blue Mesa Reservoir outside Gunnison. A 2018 Park Service report showed Curecanti attracting more than 1 million visitors a year who spent $44.1 million in nearby communities, supporting 551 jobs.
Rocky Mountain National Park has made permanent a timed-entry system to manage crowds. Memorial Day weekend travelers waited 45 minutes to enter Great Sand Dunes National Park. Utah’s national parks are urging summer visitors to “pack patience” along with their sunblock and water bottles.
Eagle County and its communities have raised $160,000 to support the Front Country Ranger program, which helps White River National Forest workers manage visitors on public lands in the Eagle River Valley. This year the White River — the most trafficked forest in the country — has lost 43 full-time employees, a 29% reduction. The White River forest also is not hiring about 50 seasonal workers.
Last year seasonal workers with the Front Country Rangers, which first formed in 2018, removed more than 5,000 pounds of trash from dispersed campsites and extinguished more than 30 abandoned and smoldering campfires. Pitkin and Summit counties use local funds to support Forest Service workers.
There’s some concern that if local communities contribute financial support to federal management of public lands, budget-slashing bureaucrats may pinch future funds.
“What if they say: ‘See, you don’t need us. You can take care of this,’” Gunnison County Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels said. The county actually declined to pitch in for the backcountry Forest Service workers, not because of a lack of appreciation for public lands but to save money for health and human services that could be slashed as the federal government shrinks.
Local budgets — even in communities where second homeowners pay big property tax bills — feel the strain of funding public land management, Daniels said.
“I don’t want to create the case for the federal government to divest,” she said. “We just don’t have the income the federal government does to absorb the magnitude of this work for very long at all even with the help of our partners. We can do this as a Band-Aid but we don’t have the funding streams to do it for the long term.”
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Breaking Trail
Vail Resorts stock price soars with CEO shakeup
Rob Katz served as Vail Resorts CEO from 2006 to 2021. The Vail Resorts board of directors named him as CEO again this week. (Handout)“As strong a company as we are, with such incredible resorts and people, we can still evolve and improve.”
— Vail Resorts incoming CEO Rob Katz
$826.5 million
Vail Resorts earnings in 2024 on $2.89 billion in total revenue in fiscal 2024
Wall Street likes the shift at Vail Resorts this week. Two days after the Broomfield resort operator’s board ousted CEO Kirsten Lynch and welcomed back 16-year CEO Rob Katz for a second round as boss, Vail Resorts stock soared.
The company’s stock traded for more than $275 a share when Lynch took the reins of the company in late 2021 and has been hovering at historic lows this season as the company grappled with a patroller strike at Park City Mountain Resort, irked investors, even angrier customers and several other challenges.
The morning after the announcement that Katz was returning as CEO, Vail Resorts stock climbed by more than 20% to $175 a share and closed at $165.
Katz transformed Vail Resorts and the entire resort industry with the Epic Pass, slashing the cost of season passes by more than half while exponentially increasing sales. Today his company sells 2.3 million lift tickets and season passes in the warm months before lifts start turning, eliminating the industry’s longtime dependence on fickle snow for revenue.
From 2006 to 2021, Katz guided the company’s acquisition of 33 of its now 42 ski areas in Australia, Canada, Europe and the U.S., helping to eliminate dependence on a particular geographic region and making the company the largest resort operator in North America.
“Rob’s 16 years as CEO included reinvigorating the company during times of industry stagnation and challenging macro environments,” read a statement from Bruce Sewell, with the company’s board of directors, which has been chaired by Katz since 2021 when Lynch took over as CEO.
Lynch was at the helm during some huge challenges for Vail Resorts, including recovery from the pandemic, staffing issues plagued by soaring home costs in mountain towns and long-simmering labor issues. In rugby, there’s a move called a “hospital pass.” It’s a toss to a player who is about to get crushed. That term was bandied about as Katz left the corner office with the company stock at all-time highs and a growing storm of threats.
In a letter to employees Tuesday, Katz said his most important goal as CEO would be aligning his workers, guests and investors under the “Experience of a Lifetime” mission. That doesn’t mean everyone will agree with each other or the company’s direction, he said. But moving forward amid disagreement and diverse opinions “is part of the responsibility of being a leader in an industry with such passionate people.”
“And it’s one of the things I look forward to the most; taking all that energy, inside and outside our company, and translating it into growth,” he said. “Growth that means more than just getting bigger, but also means evolving and improving. As strong a company as we are, with such incredible resorts and people, we can still evolve and improve.”
Colorado kayakers deploy boats, ropes to rescue puppy stuck between waterfalls in Mexico gorge
Colorado Springs pro kayaker Paul Palmer joined three other kayakers in rescuing a puppy that has tumbled over a 60-foot waterfall and was stuck above another daunting cascade in Veracruz, Mexico. (Paul Palmer, Special to The Colorado Sun)“Once we got down there we were just hoping that it wasn’t a feral, pissed, bite-y, mean dog.”
— Colorado Springs kayaker Paul Palmer
Here, loyal Outsider readers, is your feel-good story of the week.
Paul Palmer was at the lip of the 60-foot Tomata 1 waterfall on his first day kayaking in Veracruz, Mexico, in December.
His crew of expert kayakers was planning to paddle some less daunting but still demanding drops downstream when one of them spotted something moving in the pool below.
“We were at the lip and someone says ‘There’s a dog down there,’” said Palmer, a professional kayaker from Colorado Springs who won a national freestyle kayaking title in 2017.
The black pup was perched on a mossy rock shelf on the side of a pool that spilled into Tomata 2, a narrow, rocky cascade that plummets 90 feet and is renowned by top paddlers as one of the gnarliest waterfalls on the planet.
If the pup was swept into Tomata 2, “it was gonna die, for sure,” Palmer said.
So the group changed their plans. They would run the first waterfall, rescue the hound, navigate a consequential small waterfall to the very lip of Tomata 2 and climb out with the dog. (The group had ropes to rappel over the falls to reach a series of seven cascades in the inner gorge of the Rio Alseseca below Tomata 2.)
“I said we have all the gear. Let’s go get this dog out and we can do a different mission. A dog rescue mission,” said Palmer, who grew up with dogs. “There was no way that dog was going to survive a night in that cold gorge. And no way it would survive those downstream drops.”
Palmer rappelled into the pool and watched as his three partners paddled over the 60-foot Tomata 1. And then the real work began.
The only way the dog entered the gorge was over that 60-foot Tomata 1 drop. So she was rattled. Palmer spent about 30 minutes talking sweetly to the trembling, waterlogged pup. She eventually approached him. He held her for another 30 minutes.
“And she realized, ‘Yeah, you are my lifeline here,’” he said. “That was a big concern. Once we got down there we were just hoping that it wasn’t a feral, pissed, bite-y, mean dog.”
Portaging Tomata 2 is a sketchy endeavor. First paddlers need to drop a 7-foot waterfall and take out in the swirling eddy above the lip of the rarely run drop. Then they have to use ropes to scale wet rock to get to a safer place to rappel into the lower gorge. Doing that with a dog amplified the sketch factor.
Palmer loaded the dog on his sprayskirt — essentially on his lap — and clipped his quick-release safety cord around her neck, like a leash. And he paddled over the 7-footer.
The dog stayed aboard over the drop. Palmer paddled to the shore and they set up safety ropes and began scaling the drenched cliff.
“We would climb 6 feet and hand the dog up to the next person and they would climb 6 feet and hand the dog up,” Palmer said. “If we fell, we were running Tomata 2 without a boat. It was a pretty stout little extract.”
Up top, the landowner and his workers watched the whole process. They had never seen the dog before. So the rescuers brought the pup to the Adventurerec hostel, a headquarters for kayakers exploring the rivers of Veracruz.
“She walked in there like ‘This is my hostel. These are my people,’” Palmer said. “Everyone there loves her. She loves it. Now she’s the dog that ran Tomata 1.”
Palmer says the pup already is motivating kayakers who ponder the classic Tomata 1 waterfall.
“Everyone can say ‘Come on, don’t worry about it. A dog ran it!” he said.
Oh yeah … the name of the adopted waterfall-running pup: Tomata.
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